Freddy32

Until a month ago I thought the IE user interfaces were great. Then I started to play Torment on PC and BG1 on iPad again. I enjoyed the dialogues and especially the depth of the games: the riddles, the different choices to play, the open world with a ton of quests, the high difficulty level and especially the nice story telling with all those small little details. The graphics were dated and low-res but I could live with that. What really stood out in a negative way was the clunky game interface. I had the impression that big parts of the interface were useless for me and the other half was accessible through a flood of sub-menus and that it was not intuitive. I was shocked and thought: "How could my memory play those kind of tricks on me?" I played the inifinity engine games 100's of hours and this aspect never caught my attention until last month. The UI really reminded me of my first car which had no electric power steering, drum Brakes instead of discs, a choke switch and other stupid defects/restrictions. The only reason that I still like this car today is because I have nostalgic memories for it. The difference between the car and a Video game is I don't think I want to play a game because of nostalgic memories. Of course, after a couple of hours I got used to the Interface again but that part was definately the least fun for me.

I really loved the concept arts and the progress of PE so far but the UI draft really should be modern. I'm a big fan of minimalistc style GUI's as well. The Interface should be customizable (spellbook / class abilities /hotkeys ) and the Player should be able to Change the size and Position on the screen. Something like this example here (GW2): The only things that are missing in this UI is a character selection method via portraits and a text box for the conversations/combat dialog. I don't see a need to have a ton of options available on the main GUI since the game can be paused. Having a lot of options on the main Interface doesn't necessarily add depth to the game. Heavy interfaces try to simulate 'complexity' but they only make the game unintuitive and cumbersome.